15 nov. 2009

"We are in a process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy to get people actually to LOVE their servitude." - Aldous Huxley

"Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so."Bertrand Russell[1], The Impact of Science on Society, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953

[1]Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of analytic philosophy.In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales into an aristocratic family.Bertrand Russell's father, John Russell, Viscount Amberley.His paternal grandfather, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, was the second son of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, and had twice been asked to form a government by Queen Victoria, serving her as Prime Minister in the 1840s and 1860s.The Russells had been prominent for several centuries in Britain before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty. They established themselves as one of Britain's leading Whig (Liberal) families, and participated in every great political event from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-40 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688-9 to the Great Reform Act in 1832.